How to Start a Lifestyle Brand? – Complete Guide with FAQs, Tips, Advice, & More
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Developing a full-fledged brand identity for your lifestyle brand can be a very tough challenge.
Not only do you need to come up with a unified brand identity across all channels, but you also have to develop effective strategies to market it.
If you’re confused about how to get started, we suggest that you read this guide for a complete insight on how to start a lifestyle brand successfully.
Quick Summary
In this post, we’ll discuss what aspects you should be aware of and take into account when you start a lifestyle brand.
We’ll talk about all the pitfalls you must be aware of to ensure your lifestyle brand finds the right audience.
So without further ado, let’s get started.
What’s a Lifestyle Brand and How Does it Work?
A lifestyle brand strives to market and showcase the values, aspirations, and goals of a certain type of group or culture. They aim to improve the consumer’s life through their products and services.
The correct way to market a lifestyle brand can be fairly different than how you would market an ordinary brand. Most brands sell items for their utility, whereas products from lifestyle brands can be bought to express a feeling or a way of life.
Lifestyle brands strive to build a loyal customer base.
They’re the type of brand that benefits the most from loyal customers. That’s why most lifestyle brands try their best to engage their customers at the deepest level possible.
For example, automated replies for your customer service section would be totally reasonable if you were to run a tech business.
However, having automated replies and chatbots can make it seem very robotic and corporate for a lifestyle brand. Lifestyle brands want to build a deeper connection with their customers, which is why they want to present themselves as genuine people.
That’s why a major focus is put on customer satisfaction and feedback after a lifestyle brand launches a new product or service; It’s to retain loyal customers as well as to find new ones.
How Do I Start a Successful Lifestyle Brand?
As far as lifestyle brands go, it’s always a good idea to have a healthy dose of traditional as well as unorthodox tactics. This comes to all stages of the launch of the lifestyle brand from preparation, launch, marketing, and analysis.
Remember that lifestyle brands run on an emotional connection with their customer base.Here are some things you can consider and take into account to ensure that your lifestyle brand is successful and stays relevant for a long time:
Know Your Customer
While this is fairly true for all businesses, for lifestyle brands especially, you really have to know your customer inside-out.
As a lifestyle brand, you are marketing a way of life and sets of values and beliefs through your products and services. Hence, you must first identify what types of people align with the values and beliefs you want to communicate with your brand.
Once you identify the appropriate demographics and segments of people, you’ll have a good idea of who to target. You can then start to research which distribution channels would be most likely to yield good results from those segments of people.
For example, if your lifestyle brand focuses on young adults, you’d find a lot more success on social media platforms than through traditional forms of marketing such as print media.
On the other hand, if your lifestyle brand wants to aim toward older men in their 40s and 50s, then print media and billboards would be a much better marketing solution.
Hence, the marketing solution(s) to your brand should always come from a thorough knowledge of your customer base and who you want to target.
This is a great way to ensure that your marketing efforts will yield fruitful results.
Consider Multiple Revenue Streams
As is the case with most brands; it can be a good idea to focus on one flagship product. However, as a lifestyle brand, you’ll find it much more helpful if you also consider other avenues of success.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t have a flagship product. The only difference is that you should also consider other sources of revenue besides sales from that flagship product.
If a certain flagship product is your only source of revenue as a lifestyle brand, it can be dangerous for the longevity of your company.
This is because as you start to find success and build brand recognition, you will have to deal with knock-offs and similar products with lower quality.
It may seem unfair, but because of these knockoffs, the reputation of your original product may start to falter. In order to have that safety net in case something like that happens, setting up other sources of revenue can be a wise move.
This will keep your company afloat until you can make efforts to address knockoffs and rebuild the reputation of your product.
Work to Build a Relationship with Influencers
In today’s day and age, it can be crucial for most businesses to keep up with social media marketing. While this is something that you can do on your own, it can be much more helpful if you employ the help of influencers.
Of course, it’s always a good idea to build relationships that typically produce content that is relevant to your lifestyle brand’s niche. This will ensure that their followers and your potential customers overlap.
More importantly, once you enter into a collaboration or a business deal with an influencer, don’t just leave it at that. Take the time to build a deeper connection so that they would be willing to do more collaborations in the future as well.
Long-lasting relationships with influencers are something that will cement your lifestyle brand within your particular niche. Not only that but it will increase the longevity and relevance of your brand as well.
Think About Your Personal Brand
Sometimes, it’s difficult to not give in to the routine of just running your lifestyle brand like a regular brand.
However, you have to keep yourself in check and ensure that you take the appropriate measures to succeed as a lifestyle brand.
For example, many lifestyle brands typically have a key figure or personality at the center of them. This is the figure that exemplifies the values, beliefs, and aspirations that your lifestyle brand wants to promote.
Not only does this person act as a vessel for you to communicate your brand’s ideas, they also give your customers a face to relate to. They can play a key role in reaching out to collaborators as well as customers.
Build and Market an Effective Landing Page
Your landing page is something that can make or break your company especially if it’s a lifestyle brand.
It’s a very delicate balancing act to design a landing page that is effective in communicating its message without being too overwhelming. When a potential customer visits your website for the first time, you want to rope them in to perform a certain action.
This action could be anything that would encourage them to return to the website and interact with your brand again.
Some examples of calls-to-action that you can have on your landing page include:
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Following social media pages for your lifestyle brand
- Making a purchase
- Filling out a survey
Depending on the business model and reputation of your brand, you can decide what kind of calls to action to have on your landing page.
In any case, it needs to be something that would encourage the customer to return to your brand again if they are interested in what you have to offer.
As you can probably tell, all of these calls to action will benefit your lifestyle brand in some way.
For example, if you have them sign up for your newsletter, this can help you develop an effective email list of potential customers. These are the emails that you will use when you develop email marketing campaigns for your lifestyle brand in the future.
If you want to entice website visitors to make a purchase, that’s also something that you can effectively do through your landing page. However, this can have low-to-medium success rates depending on the age and reputation of your lifestyle brand.
In any case, when you create a lifestyle brand, you need to have a deep understanding of what your target audience craves. Once you’ve successfully studied that, you can develop a long-term strategy that would help you find loyal customers.
Once you’ve built a loyal customer base around your brand, you can continue to change up your landing page depending on different campaigns you run, etc.
For example, if you launch a new product, your landing page can be all about that product where you showcase its appearance and its features. The landing page can also rope visitors in by helping them visit the key features page for the new product.
This is a great example of how you can direct returning customers to another purchase from your lifestyle brand.
To create a lifestyle brand, you have to relate to your target audience’s core principles and the values they live by in their everyday life. As long as you’ve established that, you’ll have little to no trouble finding a customer base.
Once you’ve developed a landing page, you need to market it efficiently as well. We’d recommend that you link it as part of all your digital marketing campaigns.
Whether it be in emails, social media posts, or within social media bios.
Check out why personal branding is important, here.
You may run into trouble with character limits on social media. In that case, you can utilize the help of a URL shortener.
To shorten your link through Pixelfy, register your account and log in.
Step 1: Once you log in, you’ll be at the dashboard.
From here, you can check out statistics and analytics related to previous links that you shortened.
You can also create new shortened links.
Step 2: To obtain a shortened link to your landing page, copy and paste the link for your landing page into the top box of the dashboard page, as shown below.
Once you paste it, it will automatically take you to the next page. If you don’t get taken to the next page automatically, you can click on the “Shorten” box.
Step 3: On the next page, you will receive the shortened link to your landing page. You can use this link anywhere you want, such as in social media bios, posts, and email campaigns.
Wrapping Things Up…
There are many aspects that differ a lot when it comes to lifestyle brands compared to regular brands.
If you want to create a lifestyle brand, ensure you’re aware of all the pitfalls before you dive in.
For more inquiries, please reach out in the comments section below.